Europe has passed a new law on Orphaned works. In a nutshell, Any image that is found on the internet without metadata stating the images owner and copywrite or watermarked so that the owner can easily be identified and contacted are now considered orphaned works and thereby free to be used by anyone in any way they wish, including commercially. Social media sites automatically strip your metadata from images (presumably so the images are smaller) however, this leaves them free for the taking unless strongly watermarked. Read more here.http://www.naturalexposures.com/corkboa ... instagra... This includes your personal photographs of family and friends.

Not good news, but also leads to many questions. this is a UK law, but aplies to a global web applications. Does this give UK companies the rights to photos placed by people in other countries where more stringent rights do exist?

The fact is that placing your pics on the web remains open to pilfering, and in most cases regardless of law the photographer will be none the wiser unless seeing his pic being used elsewhere. Website linking to images are very difficult to stop, but at least one can discourage printed usage by posting smaller lower resolution pics, especially making sure that the photos Dpi setting are beloww 200, if not 150, which renderes it useless for printing, but still good enough for most screens.

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